No one looked as bad as Tigers first baseman Prince Fielder, who was hitless, striking out twice and grounding into a double play. He is batting .100 without an extra-base hit or RBI this series.

"Obviously, you don't visualize something like this," Fielder said. ""We're just not getting it done."

The Tigers became the first World Series team since to be shut out in consecutive games since the 1966 Los Angeles Dodgers, who were beaten by the Baltimore Orioles.

The last National League team to record back-to-back World Series shutouts? Would you believe the 1919 Cincinnati Reds, and that World Series was fixed.

"It's a lot easier to win a ballgame," Tigers DH Delmon Young said, "if you can score one. In (batting practice) we look great, but if you move the guy back 15 feet, and add a slider, and we haven't been doing anything."

Touche.

Either the Tigers are this bad, or we have underestimated the Giants, who have produced four shutouts in their last six games and are one victory away from their second World Series championship title in three years.

And, oh, how they are pitching, with Ryan Vogelsong and Tim Lincecum combining for eight of the shutout innings Saturday.

The Giants have not trailed once in their last 54 innings, leading in 44 of them. They have mauled the opposition, outscoring them 36-4 since Pablo Sandoval's homer in Game 4 of the NLCS against St. Louis.

No wonder the Tigers actually played the infield in during the second inning, with Leyland sensing again it was going to be one of those nights.

It may be time to kidnap Giants right fielder Hunter Pence, and steal a few of his inspirational lines to bail Detroit out of this mess.

"All that talk stuff is for Hoosiers and the movies," Fielder says. "That's not real life. There's nothing really to say. We just don't get to write the script and it's not working out right now.

"It's hard when you can't get much started. It's hard to keep the energy up. It's tough."

The Tigers' mighty offense was supposed to be their strength, and the pitching their weakness.

But here they are, getting superb starting pitching -- giving up just two runs in each of the last games -- and not coming close to winning either game.

The offense, on the other hand, has been turned into kitty litter.

The Tigers shut out just twice all season and now have been shut out in back-to-back games, scoring in just two of 27 innings in the World Series.

They can bring back Denny McLain, Mickey Lolich and Jack Morris to pitch, but if Fielder and Miguel Cabrera aren't hitting, the Tigers aren't winning.

The Tigers are rarely even threatening, producing seven hits in their last two games. They have come up just 11 times with runners in scoring position, and only once did they deliver hit.

Three times they came up with at least two runners on base on Saturday, and three times they failed.

They had their best opportunity in the fifth inning with the bases loaded, two outs, and Cabrera at the plate. Cabrera had just been honored by Major League Baseball for winning the first Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 and for winning the American League Hank Aaron ward, with Aaron even saying that Cabrera should be the hands-down winner of the AL MVP Award.

Cabrera hit a foul ball blooper on the first pitch and then popped up the second pitch, a 91-mph fastball, into the hands of shortstop Brandon Crawford.

The sellout crowd moaned in disbelief.

Who can blame TV viewers for making this potentially the least-viewed World Series of all time?

There's more drama watching re-runs of "Gilligan's Island" than this affair.

The Tiger fans can't stand to watch it, and the Giants' fans are bored by it, almost feeling sorry for the Tigers.

The Tigers never trailed in their four-game sweep over the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series.

They have never led in this World Series.

There have been 23 times in World Series history that a team has gone up 3-0. Twenty of those resulted in sweeps.

The only question seems to be whether the Tigers can actually score Sunday.

"We don't expect to go out and throw a shutout every time," Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford says, "but with the guys we have, it's not a surprise if we do it again."